like those occasional figures in the street which rivet the observer’s eye and haunt his memory” (OC II, 309; PML 83). Singularly beautiful and graceful, he has an intense devotion to the eternal, to beauty, and to the supernatural order that goes conspicuously against the grain of the pursuit of material goods that defines his sociopolitical context. In “Notes nouvelles,” Baudelaire presents Poe as a teacher who argues for the divinity of beauty. Summarizing Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle,” he suggests that the desire for beauty is akin to the desire for the afterlife: “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven…. It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem melts us to tears, those tears are not the proof of an excess of pleasure, but rather evidence of a certain petulant, impatient sorrow—of a nervous postulation—of a nature exiled amid the imperfect, and eager to seize immediately, on this very earth, upon a revealed paradise” (OC II, 334; PML 107–8). Attended in life and mourned after death, like Christ, by his beloved “mother” (actually his mother-in-law, the serendipitously named Maria Clemm), Poe suffers for the glory of divine Beauty. At the end of the 1852 essay, Baudelaire compares Poe explicitly to Christ: “I should willingly say of him and of a special class of men what the catechism says of our Lord: ‘He has suffered much for us’ ” (OC II, 288; BOP 85). In Mon coeur mis à nu, he reports that he prays every day “to God, source of all power and justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe, as intercessors” (OC I, 673; IJ 61).
The cruel tyrant that martyrs Poe is public opinion, a phenomenon Baudelaire traces to the individualism inherent in the democratic order.27 Public opinion threatens the liberty of artists by pressing its (false) claims of equality. Even more than legal equality, American democracy valorizes equality of opinion—a position fundamentally at odds with Baudelaire’s belief in an aristocracy of taste—and in so doing effectively undermines the very liberties modern republics like America claim to secure for their citizens. Baudelaire’s account of American literary culture appeals directly to the traditional republican conception of political decadence as a substitution of private interest for the public good. America is a nation that “begins with decadence and starts off where the others leave off,” where the public never ceases speaking and therefore never allows the best work a chance to be heard. “At once young and old,” writes Baudelaire, “America chatters and gabbles on [bavarde et radote] with an astonishing volubility. Who could number her poets? they are countless. Her blue-stockings? they overwhelm the reviews.” The nation is a “ferment of mediocrities,” swarming with “compilers galore, literary parrots, plagiarists of plagiaries, and critics of critics” (OC II, 320–21; PML 94). America’s political decadence here lies in its anarchic literary activity and its literary decadence in its political principles, which elevate the chattering and self-interested individual over the needs of the collective. Poe’s frequent lamentation that America lacks an aristocracy is, for Baudelaire, an attack on American literary culture as much as on its political system.
Difficult as it is for the true poet to be heard in the chaos of American literary culture, there is no worse fate under the regime of public opinion, writes Baudelaire in “Notes nouvelles,” than becoming a target of critical judgment. Publishing is the prelude to literary-critical violence: “What is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well-nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police-constable of opinion, and keeps order on behalf of his vices—or of his virtues, it is all one” (OC II, 327; PML 101). The imagery in this passage recalls the scene of street violence in the Salon de 1846, in which the police are praised for beating the “republicans of art,” who put their individual concerns ahead of the public good of beauty. As in the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire criticizes the ostensible enforcers of the public good for serving only their private interests. By contrast with the earlier street scene, however, Baudelaire here claims public opinion is allied with state violence, battering the true artists who struggle to be heard over the din. Although public opinion might seem to be democratic and collective, it really represents private individuals deputizing themselves to enforce their prejudices in the public sphere, with the tacit backing of the state. A fundamental perversion of democratic principles, public opinion threatens literature both by making the writer endlessly answerable to this public and by refusing to discriminate the legitimate from the illegitimate claim.
Baudelaire’s critique of public opinion recalls any number of snobbish dismissals of mass literacy and democratic politics from the period, but its association of American literary culture with state violence is grounded on Maistre’s claim that democratic institutions necessarily undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens.28 According to Maistre, social contract theory relies on the false premise that political authority can be generated by unaided human reason. For social contract theorists, sovereignty belongs originally to each individual, who sacrifices some portion of it upon entering society in exchange for safety and companionship; written constitutions are intended to preserve the remaining share of natural right against the potential encroachments of the government or a tyrannous majority. For Maistre, by contrast, authority flows from God alone and passes to the people through hereditary lineage and ecclesiastical institutions. In his most explicit account of this contrast between divine and contractual authority, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques [Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions] (1809), which Baudelaire praises in his correspondence, Maistre takes the fact that modern constitutions are invariably written as an emblem of their illusory authority. Unlike the divine rights “written in the heart”—and unlike, we might note, the “unwritten” laws that govern “institutions” like dandyism—those rights inscribed on paper cannot provide security for a fallen humanity. Drawing upon Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus, Maistre describes written constitutions as weak and subject to the predations of tyrannous usurpers like Robespierre: “He who believes himself able by writing alone to establish a clear and lasting doctrine is a great fool. If he really possessed the seeds of truth, he could never believe that a little black liquid and a pen could germinate them in the world, protect them from harsh weather, and make them sufficiently effective.”29 Authority can have no worldly origin, and relies for its continuation on this sense of mystery. The postrevolutionary proliferation of written laws—apparently fixed but in fact open to endless interpretation—is a sign that order has already broken down. “The more nearly perfect an institution is,” Maistre claims, “the less it writes.”30 His political ideal is the English constitution, a traditional balance of power defined by key parliamentary acts, common law rights, judicial precedents, royal prerogative, and international treaties, but never formally written down like modern constitutions. The French Revolution, by contrast, is a “frightful book.”31
Baudelaire regards Poe’s sacrifice at the hands of public opinion as dramatic evidence of Maistre’s thesis. The freedom of speech guaranteed in writing by the American constitution crushes the freedom of those outside of the mediocre majority. Public opinion threatens political order by making individual prejudice sovereign, and denying beauty its proper role as a supreme collective good. In the 1856 Poe essay, Baudelaire draws upon classical political theory to characterize the way public opinion subverts the very political order that gives it life: “What a pitiless dictatorship is that of opinion in a democratic society! Ask of it neither charity nor indulgence, nor any sort of flexibility in the application of its laws to the multiple and complex issues of the moral life. You might think that the impious love of liberty had given birth to a new tyranny, a bestial tyranny, or zoocracy, whose savage insensibility recalls the idol of Juggernaut” (OC II, 297–98; PML 71). With the 1851 coup d’état lurking in the shadows, this passage traces the same nightmarish historical trajectory predicted by Maistre’s critique of social contract theory. Dictators were figures elevated by the Roman Republic to absolute power in times of emergency, who had the authority to suspend the constitution but were expected to step down after the danger had passed, and were forbidden to serve more than six months. Modern public opinion, for Baudelaire, entails a similar suspension in liberal democracies. Exercised out of individual interest rather than for the collective good, it
